Small Media Happy, Fiction Mafia Miffed Over Pulitzer Prizes

Award-winning cartoon by Politico's Matt Wuerker

This year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, with some winners bringing welcome new blood into the media mix. According to the Washington Post's report on the prizes, the Pulitzer jurors found the year's best journalism outside the heavy, big-city hitters. That small, relatively unknown reporters and photographers could create prize-winning pieces is a testimony to their determination, skill, and editorial backing. The Pulitzer committee also awarded a prize to a writer from the Huffington Post (a publication whose editor is, in my opinion, intellectually and morally dishonest) and a cartoonist from another blog, Politico.

Journalism is difficult work, often denigrated by a public that prefers ideology and certitude to reasoned argument and dispassionate fact. What's striking about the Pulitzer winners is the risks implicit in the stories they covered so well. They weren't paid enough for their labors and the hazards of their jobs, but you can't put a price on guts.

Ironically, while new media advanced, the Pulitzer committee stiffed the fiction category. This decision, according to a New York Times report, has upset the fiction mafia and some percentage of people who actually read "serious" contemporary novels. While the supposed focus of the publishers' ire was the snubbed books' quality, the Times piece kept coming back to the impact of the Pulitzer action on book sales. Apparently not bent out of shape by the Pulitzer decision was Nora Roberts, whose novels are massive best sellers. She doesn't give a damn about the Pulitzer, or any other award. For a rather different look at an author's life and perspective on publishing, by all means read a recent Washington Post feature on Ms. Roberts.